So after seeing Tom Hardy's transformation for the film Bronson, and looking into his workout, I wanted to see what everyone here thought about Tom Hardy's workout philosophy, or more accurately, the philosophy of his trainer, Pnut. If you're not familiar with the film, here's what Mr. Hardy looked like before and during it:

His trainer had him doing mostly body weight exercises at different points in the day, maintaining that if you subject your body to constant stress throughout the day that your body is more likely to adapt to the stress and your growth will be more immediate. Hardy was consuming about 6,000 calories per day, working out 4 or 5 times a day, and claims he did not use any drugs to induce muscular growth (something I'm sure will start an argument, but that's what he says nonetheless).

He put on about 42 lbs in about five weeks, granted there is a healthy amount of fat there, but plenty of muscle. He stuck with exercises that the real Charlie Bronson did or would be able to do in prison.

Obvious steroids is obvious, but for a film role that is expected. He did not rely on bodyweight training (as recommended in Bronson's fantastic book) but on heavy gym work, obviously a lot of shrugs (look at those traps!), mixed with a lot of mobility and flexibility work to help with fight scenes etc.

As for Bronson the man, he was a strongman and fighter before entering prison. You do not build a body like that with bodyweight training alone. He had a very strong, powerful base to build on when he entered prison.

Tarzan wrote:Attributing a single body part to steroids is retarded. Steroids mostly just allow for much harder training.

One reason for this correlation between muscularity and neck shape/size is that certain places of the body have a higher percentage of androgen receptors than others. The neck muscles are one such muscle group with a larger number of receptors. This becomes particularly in cases of androgen supplementation.

I have a huge neck and I never took steroids. I will say though, that the roundness of the deltoids are a good sign to look for. if they look like cannonballs they they are most definitely juicing (or using synthol).